Belarus dictator's family loves EU luxuries, flight data shows

TL;DR

She is one of thousands of victims of Lukashenko's crackdown on people who rejected his fake re-election in 2020 — an ongoing horror show that risks being forgotten amid the daily headlines of Russia's war in Ukraine.In 2017, Anna and her family also went skiing in Innsbruck (Austria), celebrated her birthday in a 25-day long splurge in Cagliari (Italy) on a private jet, and visited the five-star Banana Island Resort in Doha.The flight data, covering the period 2011 to 2019, was obtained by Belarusian hacker-activists Cyber Partisans and published by a group of exiled journalists called the Belarusian Investigative Center.In 2017, for instance, Anna and her husband flew home from a birthday trip in Cagliari to Minsk with a Slovenian businessman, Zivorad Smiljković from the Ljubljana-based firm Riko, which has trousered tens of millions of euros in construction contracts in Belarus.The EU embassy in Minsk was making enquiries about the health of Kolesnikova, the jailed Belarusian opposition leader, the source said, in what they called "silent diplomacy"."

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